This is a game about time travel. My review will contain swears this time!
The story in this one is so bad-ass! It’s about this crazy conspiracy that’s happening in a time travel “company,” where people are involved using their own time-travel-created duplicates from the past and there’s murder and intrigue and you’re attacked by your own alternate self with a baseball bat. There is some serious Primer shit going on here!
….I… can’t play the game! It literally lags for me. I got, specifically, to the point where the key NPC Evil Eric left you behind in his room to find a necklace he hid for his new conspiracy wife, and I guess he was doing something really computationally expensive off-screen because the game slowed to a crawl. It was taking like a minute to resolve each simple command.
I finally got bored waiting and checked the walkthrough to see how long it took Evil Eric to come back to the room, and the answer is apparently “quite a while!” But since the walkthrough turned out to be a transcript that contained the story, I read it… and I was intrigued, but I was having considerable technical problems with the actual game.
It’s too bad, because, all things considered, I would’ve rather played this than read a transcript of it. The transcript was fairly normalized when it came to conversation options, but until I hit unbeatable lag, I was tending to choose the “none of the above” conversation choices that made my character in to a raving psycho. That amused me greatly.
Now this is one of those rare instances where I read a bunch of other reviews before posting my own, spoilers and all, because I wanted to see if other people experienced that technical problem or if it was just me. There was also a part that I figured was going to be controversial, and, it was! Specifically, the game lets you choose your gender after the first introduction scene, but it does so by offering you two items of clothing which are gendered. If you choose the dress, your character is female, and if you choose the suit you are automatically male. I personally prefer wearing a dress to a suit anyway, but obviously not everyone, especially in the IF community, is going to be comfortable with these enforced norms.
Anyway, I was really disappointed with the technical issues in this game, because the actual situation showed promise, but there were a lot of bits that felt buggy or under-implemented. Mainly, it was slow, good gravy. I have never played an IF game that was this slow to process basic commands (and no, I wasn’t running anything intense in the background, and, I just got my computer fixed and there’s nothing wrong with it).
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